thatcher:pure evil or misunderstood wonderwoman?

invincibleirish

well its been over a decade since her fall from grace and opinions round my family still seem sharply divided about her,for the record i think she is an evil women who deserves nothing but scorn.

The Corinthian

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Nevyn

hmmm would you feel as vehemently towards what she achieved and the policies with which she shaped a nation if it had of been the same policies but in place by a male PM ?

OR could you not sperate the two?

The Beer Baron

hmmm would you feel as vehemently towards what she achieved and the policies with which she shaped a nation if it had of been the same policies but in place by a male PM ?

my answer?
Georgina W Bush.

What a horrible woman/leader she was.

And for what? For a few farmers and a flock of penguins, and
to secure another term of office for that Margaret Thatcher.
- a rare piece of intelligent political commentary from Bottom.

mike65

:rolleyes: (recycle bin becones methinks...)

Mike.

Capt'n Midnight

Mrs T

The first PM to benefit from the NHS / Public education and has done the most damage to it upto then

Allowed North Sea Oil to cause high inflation - result Her + cronies made fortunes on savings + british manufacturing industry wiped - £750bn wasted - if Scotland had been independent they would have a great country and England would still be the main manufacturing centre in Europe

Falklands - except that there was a election coming this could have been settled peacefully - if the invasion had happened 3 months later they would have had two aircraft carriers less....

Lots of fuss about how she would not be moved on europe - but they caved in behind the scenes

redefining unemployment - now "job seakers" - only one of the 30 changes in the definition increased the numbers

abolishing the poverty line - so no one is below it anymore..

look at what happened to Northern England

Also has made the Tories unelectable for at least a Generation
(they got fewer votes in every election that they were in power)

invincibleirish

hmmm would you feel as vehemently towards what she achieved and the policies with which she shaped a nation if it had of been the same policies but in place by a male PM ?

yes.attempting to turn this into a male v female thing is kinda petty to my mind.

Nevyn

just that when male leaders are harsh they are not as percived as badly as a female leader taking the same action
it does happen,

so just curious

sceptre

Nothing to do with her being a woman. She managed to do her level best to turn Britain into a two-tier society and fostered a xenophobic mistrust amongst the people she was leading. Major was useless because he was inept, not because he was a man. Thatcher managed to ruin Britain because she was more interested in holding on to power in Westminster and Wandsworth than the welfare of the common joes, not because she was a woman.

I'd like to think we're moving beyond both attacking a person just because of their sex and defending a person for the same pathetic reason.

Monaterism was one of the worst things ever to happen to the island to the east of us. You can blame inept economists if you like instead (some Irish economists like Tony Leddin regard them as more culpable then her) but the bottom line was that she went along with it, embraced it and told everyone it would be the saviour of the country. She was dead wrong and people have been picking up the pieces since. She made the decision to surround herself with idiot bullies like Tebbitt that were never going to be a threat to her and she bears responsibility for the decisions they made that she authorised. People would have been better off if she'd stuck to taking over her father's grocery shop.

PH01

Originally posted by The Corinthian
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Over Mrs. T?

bloggs

She was a union buster, so she wasn't all bad

ReefBreak

Originally posted by bloggs
She was a union buster, so she wasn't all bad

Agreed - the UK industry was a disaster before she came along, 3 days weeks, stopages and strikes every other day before she came along. She took on the overpowerful Unions and won. The UK is now one the world's top economies.

Turnip

She did some good things (curbed union power, promoted private enterprise, privatised steel, gas and telecoms, freed the Falklands) and some bad things (mismanagement of the hunger strikes, poll tax, poor attitude to europe, and didn't know when to quit which wrecked the conservative party).

Not sure if curbing local government power was a good things or not.

mike65

I could never say I was a fan as such. But my God, she was needed at the time. Red Robbo and his friends would have had
the UK on its knees to the World Bank and Moscow.

Mike.

shotamoose

Originally posted by Turnip
She did some good things (curbed union power, promoted private enterprise, privatised steel, gas and telecoms, freed the Falklands) and some bad things (mismanagement of the hunger strikes, poll tax, poor attitude to europe, and didn't know when to quit which wrecked the conservative party).

Not sure if curbing local government power was a good things or not.

Hey don't forget the big increases in poverty, unemployment and inequality, oh and wrecking public services too.

Originally posted by Mike65
Red Robbo and his friends would have had the UK on its knees to the World Bank and Moscow

Maybe I'm ignorant, but who was Red Robbo?

Turnip

Originally posted by shotamoose
Hey don't forget the big increases in poverty, unemployment and inequality, oh and wrecking public services too.

What would you have done to bring inflation (13% I think in 1979) down?

I think the Red Robbomike65 refers to is Derek Robinson, a union nutter who organised hundreds of strikes at british leyland.

Capt'n Midnight

RE: the UK industry was a disaster before she came along, 3 days weeks, stopages and strikes every other day before she came along. She took on the overpowerful Unions and won. The UK is now one the world's top economies.

eh? - She beat the unions by more or less making all thier members unemployed. Most of the growth has been in non-union services, and we here know all about service industries moving offshore very quickly.... Heavy industry can't relocate that easily.

BTW: most of the loss making mines closed, saved less money than was later paid out in increased dole... - so political or incompetance.

Depending on how you look at the stats (and what day it is) Italy is a bigger economy than UK - that would have been unthinkable back then.

Bringing inflation down - read my previous post - it would not have helped thier investments - but it killed off the north of england. ever watched "Boy from the black stuff" - Yosser Hughes etc.

mike65

Thatcher did'nt invent high unemployment, rather the policies that were required to reform the industrial base of the UK meant
many jobs were destined to go. The British ecomony had been living a lie for a generation. So old industry was swept away, unemployment rocketed and then as the new replaced the old, unemployment fell. Its got the lowest unemployment rate of any
major economy. One could have discusion regarding the move from blue-collar to white collar prosperity but all devoloped economies have less grit under thier fingernails....

As for Italy haveing a bigger ecomoney that may be so (depending what day you measure as you say) but so what?. Italy is allowed to grow too! (BTW I would'nt trust the Italian figures much!)

Mike.

The Corinthian

Originally posted by mike65
BTW I would'nt trust the Italian figures much!

Why not? He didn't even tell you where his stats came from.

shotamoose

Originally posted by Turnip
What would you have done to bring inflation (13% I think in 1979) down?

I think the Red Robbomike65 refers to is Derek Robinson, a union nutter who organised hundreds of strikes at british leyland.

Why do you think inflation is more important than employment, poverty, inequality and public services? Why would anyone, unless you were a banker? Thatcher seemed to go out of her way to ruin millions of lives as part of some quasi-religious crusade, far and above whatever might have been 'necessary' to adjust the economy. Britain is still recovering from the excesses of her reign.

mike65

Originally posted by shotamoose
Why do you think inflation is more important than employment, poverty, inequality and public services? Why would anyone, unless you were a banker? Thatcher seemed to go out of her way to ruin millions of lives as part of some quasi-religious crusade, far and above whatever might have been 'necessary' to adjust the economy. Britain is still recovering from the excesses of her reign.

Inflation is the biggest jobs killer. Costs rise business becomes less competitive and unemployment follows. Why do you think every, EVERY, government frets about inflation and interest rates?

Mike.

shotamoose

Originally posted by mike65
Inflation is the biggest jobs killer. Costs rise business becomes less competitive and unemployment follows. Why do you think every, EVERY, government frets about inflation and interest rates?

Mike.

Inflation is important, because too much of it causes unemployment and poverty. Thatcher switched the means with the ends and made inflation the be-all and end-all, so that employment and economic security suffered. It was a completely backwards way to go about economic policy, and it benefitted bankers more than anyone. The same 'philosophy' has been applied to the Third World for the last two decades by the bankers representatives at the International Monetary Fund, with similarly disastrous results.

sceptre

Originally posted by shotamoose
Thatcher switched the means with the ends and made inflation the be-all and end-all, so that employment and economic security suffered. It was a completely backwards way to go about economic policy, and it benefitted bankers more than anyone.

Damn straight.

And that's why we can criticise monetarism as being complete unworkable bunkum and should criticise Thatcher for falling for it. Milton Friedman was always sure that inflation could be totally controlled by limiting the money supply. He was proved wrong when people eventually figured out that the money supply was suitable as a policy target if and only if the relationship between money and nominal GDP (and obviously, hence, inflation) is stable and predictable. Certainly in the early 80s it was not. As a matter of fact, it rarely is and that's why monetarist philosophy is useful only in a closed and perfect economy (and only slightly useful then - as shotamoose implies, monetarism totally ignores the principle of well-being). Britain hasn't been either in over 200 years, if even then.

The minute the velocity of circulation of money changes, monetarism is useless. It was an incredibly clever theory but not one that was actually very useful in practice. It's founded on the principle that sustained money growth in excess of the growth of output produces inflation and to end inflation or produce deflation, money growth must fall below the growth of output. This is essentially all that monetarism has to offer. It sounds good and Friedman was quite good at presenting it. He was wrong and unfortunately viewed his Nobel prize as an indication that the world thought he was right. Thatcher fell for that one too.

Friedman even had to change the definition of money to make monetarism work on paper. Most normal economists regard "money" as cash in circulation and its close equivalents. Friedman went off and included hard to reach money in the equation. If you can't get at it easily it shouldn't be in the equation in the first place. If the thesis was changed to include a more useful definition of money, monetarism would be a little more useful but it's still about as useful in practice as communism where resources are (relatively) scarce and people are (relatively) greedy - it falls foul of the nature of man when dealing with the market.

Keynes was wrong when he said that money doesn't matter. Friedman was wrong when he said that nothing else matters.

Nicholas Kaldor warned everyone in 1981 about the ill effects that monetarism would have. Hardly anyone listened until a few years had passed. This is a nice introduction as to why monetarism is (as I said above) complete bunkum. It looks at the implementation and failure of monetarism in the US and UK so it's worth at least a cursory glance.

Shockingly in 1970 (Counter-Revolution in Monetary Theory, the new testament of the economist antichrists:D), Friedman decided that Keynes would have been in favour of monetarism and managed to toss in "if Keynes were alive today, he would no doubt be at the forefront of the counter-revolution" even though monetarism is founded on the principle of Keynesian economics being incorrect. I'm still quite appalled by that, so much so that I memorised the quote. It's equivalent to Yasser Arafat saying that Golda Meir would be on the side of the Palestinians if she were still alive or that a turkey would vote for Christmas if only it could understand it.

I know it might seem as if I'm just attacking Friedman for the sake it it (the evils of monetarism is admittedly one of my favourite soapboxes). It was the staypin of economic policy in Thatcher's Britain up to 1986 though and the problems associated with it lasted at least until 1992. You can't examine Thatcher's Britain without placing the failure of monetarist policies at the centre of that examination. Her policies were a failure. Her Britain was a failure. One would have thought that, given Thatcher's special friendship with Pinochet, she'd have recognised what the excesses of the Chicago school and monetarism in particular had done to Chile's economy. Missed that one too. The woman was blind to failure if it didn't suit her to notice it.

(hmmm, made it all the way to the end without castigating the PDs for being the last remaining supporters of the Church of laissez-faire Friedman)

Manach

my 2c, bad thing, good king.

Turnip

Originally posted by shotamoose
Why do you think inflation is more important than employment, poverty, inequality and public services? Why would anyone, unless you were a banker? Thatcher seemed to go out of her way to ruin millions of lives as part of some quasi-religious crusade, far and above whatever might have been 'necessary' to adjust the economy. Britain is still recovering from the excesses of her reign.

The place was a shambles. Hard choices had to be made. Ruined lives? Nobody starved did they? The unions were waging war against the government and making Britain as uncompetitive as possible. Contrast their policies with those of German unions who worked with the government to improve the economy overall. We need someone wth the sheer nerve of Thatcher here. I'm not so sure anymore that anyone in the PD's can do the business though.

Villain

I done a project on the Hunger Strikers in the H block during Thatcher's time and I came to one conclusion:

Bitch

and My current gf who is english agrees.

ReefBreak

Originally posted by irish1
I done a project on the Hunger Strikers in the H block during Thatcher's time and I came to one conclusion:

Bitch

and My current gf who is english agrees.

There is no doubt that Thatcher and the Hunger Strikers created a new batch of volunteers, sorry, murderers for the IRA. However, whatever about their "martyr" status, my sympathy for them is zero. At the time, she did what I would have probably done: treated them as murderous criminals rather than "political prisoners".

Capt'n Midnight

RE: Ruined lives? Nobody starved did they?

Look at the numbers of people who were taken off unemployment - look at the suicide rate in North East of England...

WhiteWashMan

capt midnight, i fail to see where your points are.
you have put together a list of things, and some of them arent even accurate.

you have given a choice here, so why dont you tell us, aloing with your correct and accurate reasons for thinking she is evil, or why you think she is misunderstood?


by the way, have you recently done some study on conservative england of the 70's and 80's or something.

just one thing, if you went into your education of the unions and the way that thatcher undermined (no pun intended) and beat the unions, and perticularly the miners unions of england and wales, you would see that tory party of the time had a brilliant stratagy. i wont say margaret thatcher did, because she was just the head of the government, and one perosn is not entirely accountabale for a governements administration.

by the way, in what way was she evil?
did she torture small defenceless animals or something?

Turnip

Originally posted by ReefBreak
There is no doubt that Thatcher and the Hunger Strikers created a new batch of volunteers, sorry, murderers for the IRA. However, whatever about their "martyr" status, my sympathy for them is zero. At the time, she did what I would have probably done: treated them as murderous criminals rather than "political prisoners".

It's a good thing you'll never have have any position of responsibility then. If you had done the same then you would have been directly responsible for more deaths as the conflict dragged on. The IRA (and the loyalist scum who were far worse imo) should have been given the status they wanted. It would have been a small price to pay to sap popular support.

star gazer

She was a woman in a man's world and so had to compensate by being that little bit more extreme in her policies